What are good OKRs for customer success?

A strategic approach involves mapping KPIs to the customer lifecycle stages, fostering a sense of purpose and confidence in your efforts.

For instance:

• NPS Over CSAT: While CSAT often leans towards support, NPS serves as a robust starting point, eventually evolving into a Customer Effort Score (CES) to gauge the efficacy of minimizing customer effort.

• Onboarding Success Rate: Measure the effectiveness of onboarding in delivering value, thereby nurturing customer confidence and satisfaction.

• Health Score and Adoption: Evaluate the overall health of customer relationships, considering both depth and breadth of engagement to ensure sustained success.

• Engagement Cadence: Tailor engagement frequency across various customer personas, fostering meaningful interactions at every touchpoint.

• Retention Monitoring: Continuously assess customer loyalty and satisfaction, providing insights into the overall customer experience.

Each KPI serves a distinct purpose: to analyze customer feedback, mitigate risks, and strategize ways to enhance the customer journey. While specific metrics like Expansions, Qualified Leads, and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) may not be initially owned, mastering foundational KPIs lays the groundwork for influencing these metrics.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal-setting methodology that drives focus, alignment, and transparency within an organization.

Deriving OKRs for Functional Groups:

1. Top-Down Alignment:

   • Leadership sets broad, strategic OKRs.

   • Departments derive their OKRs to align with these top-level goals.

2. Cascade to Teams:

   • Teams create specific OKRs that support departmental objectives.

3. Individual Contribution:

   • Employees set personal OKRs linked to their team’s objectives.

OKRs vs. KPIs:

• OKRs: Ambitious, time-bound goals with clear, measurable outcomes.

• KPIs: Ongoing metrics that track performance and operational health.

Connection: OKRs can include KPIs as key results to measure progress.

Customer Success OKRs

Objective 1: Enhance Customer Retention

• KR 1.1: Decrease churn rate from 10% to 5% by year-end.

• KR 1.2: Increase customer renewal rate from 80% to 95%.

• KR 1.3: Implement an early warning system for at-risk accounts and achieve a 90% follow-up rate within 48 hours.

Objective 2: Drive Customer Expansion

• KR 2.1: Increase upsell revenue by 30% by Q4.

• KR 2.2: Boost cross-sell volume by 25% within 6 months.

• KR 2.3: Achieve a 20% increase in average customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Objective 3: Bolster Customer Loyalty

• KR 3.1: Launch a customer loyalty program and enroll 500 customers within the first quarter.

• KR 3.2: Increase the number of customer advocates (NPS promoters) from 100 to 150.

• KR 3.3: Achieve a 90% retention rate among loyalty program members.

Objective 4: Optimize Onboarding Experience

• KR 4.1: Increase onboarding completion rate from 65% to 85%.

• KR 4.2: Reduce time-to-first-value (TTFV) for new customers from 30 days to 15 days.

• KR 4.3: Achieve a 95% satisfaction rate in post-onboarding surveys.

These OKRs focus on critical aspects of customer success including retention, expansion, loyalty, and onboarding, ensuring a comprehensive approach to customer management and growth.

The best KPIs that I have seen include:

• Net Revenue Retention

• Gross Revenue Retention

• QBRs completed

• Health score impacted (e.g., number of customers who move from red to green)

• Number of Account Plans created

• Customer Success Qualified Leads generated

• Multi-year contracts secured (if CSMs own renewal)

• Price increases generated within contracts (again if CSM owns renewal)

• NPS